Happy Earth Day?

 


Why does that sound like "happy colonoscopy"?

The New Republic asks "Remember When Earth Day Used to Be Cool?"


A person could be forgiven for being cynical about Earth Day in 2022. Even ExxonMobil celebrates the holiday. Last year, the company released an ad praising its employees around the world who “work tirelessly to reduce emissions and work toward a low-carbon future.” Some of the employees seem sincere, while others look a bit like they’re starring in a hostage video, eyes wide, a little too intense in their assertions of gratitude and fealty. Some are working on lowering emissions through natural gas production and carbon capture. One earnest soul identifies ways to make refineries more energy efficient. Another even asserts that she is doing this work for her children’s future, “which is energizing and motivating.”

Earth Day has been like this for a while now: an apparent competition between polluters to see who can most shamelessly “greenwash” their brand. We barely feel surprised to hear oil company employees from Clinton, New Jersey and Midland, Texas telling us that they’re the ones saving the world. It’s easy to lapse into total cynicism about the holiday, even the wholesome beach cleanups—particularly when the beach cleanups are taking place amid the near complete collapse of the Biden administration’s climate platform. It’s too easy to forget Earth Day’s early history, which is inspiring and long overdue for a revival.

e360.yale reminds us that the USA has warmed 2.6 degrees F since the first Earth Day in 1970.
 

Comments

  1. TrailblazerApril 23, 2022 at 4:58 PM

    Earth day has been hijacked just as the word woke, amongst others, has been .
    The Modus operandi of the right has been, for some time, to twist and reconfigure well meaning progressive views in such a way that they are deemed offensive.
    So far they have been very successful.
    The result has been the great divide between political views .

    TB


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibApril 24, 2022 at 1:00 PM

      I had the gut-wrenching experience on Earth Day of watching a TV ad from the Canadian petro-types, pure greenwashing. Preposterous

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more